When Microsoft’s CEO Steve Ballmer unveiled the Bing search engine at the All Things Digital conference in May 2009, Google was already the established king of search. Today, Bing continues to not be the most widely-used search engine, but it still offers some great marketing opportunities that can help organizations achieve their performance goals.
Here are four reasons why organizations should consider appearing in Bing’s search results with paid ads:
1. The Bing Network has a respectable search engine market share
These are the latest domestic search engine market share figures from Statcounter:
While these stats suggest going live on Bing would only give you the opportunity to appear on 5.86% of search engine queries, running ads from Microsoft’s Bing Ads platform actually allows you to appear on many more queries.
Microsoft has had a longstanding partnership with Yahoo!, and as of last month Bing now exclusively serves all search ads across Yahoo!’s properties. Additionally, Microsoft is responsible for delivering ads across DuckDuckGo and MSN, so Bing Ads would be responsible for powering ads across at least 11.70% of search engine queries within the United States.
2. Bing searchers are a great audience
Search engine usage can vary by demographic, and Bing is commonly known as having the most affluent and oldest users. Here’s an overview of Bing’s users within the United States:
Nearly 1/3 of the Bing Network’s audience has a household income above $100k
Half of all Bing users graduated college
Nearly half are married
Bing users are split evenly between male and female
As a result of this user make-up, marketers can drive good results when selling products and services.
Additionally, running on Bing allows you to appear against searchers unique to its network. According to Microsoft, Bing can reach 63M searches that Google can’t, resulting in 27% of search clicks unique to Bing’s network.
3. Bing generates strong performance
For example, one of Funnel’s major accounts has complete Google/Bing parity across keywords, creatives, campaigns, and so on. After completing an apples-to-apples comparison of Brand query performance, Bing came out ahead of Google. Bing had a conversion rate of 6.59% versus Google’s 4.59%, and Bing’s 15.07 ROAS beat Google’s 12.12.
Additionally, we’ve noticed that Bing CPCs are typically cheaper than Google because there is less competition. These lower costs contribute to Bing’s higher return-on-ad-spend.
4. Bing has parity with Google’s search capabilities
Both Bing and Google’s paid search foundations are the same. For example, they use the same account structure, creative specs, query matching capabilities, and much more. Additionally, whenever Google releases a new ad product or capability, Microsoft usually duplicated those new functionalities in a timely manner.
Wrap-Up
Interested in learning more about Bing or paid search in general? Reach out to us today to learn more.
